The price of putting things off: why time always sends the bill

Why do we leave everything for tomorrow? The illusion of “I’ll sort it out tomorrow”

We have a terrible habit of thinking our future self will be almost a superhero. In our heads, next week’s “me” will have more focus, more patience and a lot more money to spare. It’s this comforting lie that makes us put off what matters. We believe that once things calm down, we’ll finally get organized. The truth is that the ideal moment never comes.

We put things off because the brain treats our future self almost like another person. Next week’s “me” seems more willing and less busy, so pushing the task onto them feels free. But every delay charges interest in anxiety, worse choices and, often, money.

Psychology has a curious explanation for this. In a series of experiments, researcher Emily Pronin and her colleagues asked people to decide how much of a disgusting drink (a mix of ketchup and soy sauce) they would drink in the name of science. When the decision was for themselves, right now, they chose a little. When it was for their “future self”, they agreed to a lot more, almost as much as they chose for a stranger.¹ In practice, we treat our tomorrow self as if they were someone else, and push onto them what we don’t want to do today.

Our daily scramble

Just look at our small decisions. It’s the gift you leave for the last day and end up paying more for something that isn’t even that good. It’s the exam material that piles up and makes you pull an all-nighter fueled by coffee and despair. It’s the gym membership that’s always left for next Monday.

And there’s an aggravating factor: we’re terrible at estimating how long things take. In a classic study, psychology students estimated it would take them about 34 days to finish their senior thesis. On average, it took them more than 55. Only about 30% finished within the deadline they had predicted themselves.² When we put things off, we bet on a deadline that almost never holds.

We’re constantly kicking simple tasks down the road. And we do exactly the same with our money. The logic of trying to “catch up” at the last minute burns an absurd amount of energy, drains our mental health and destroys our power of choice.

How do you stop putting things off? The 5-brick rule

In behavioral economics, this search for immediate comfort is called present bias. The brain wants an easy life now, whatever the future cost. Harvard economist David Laibson showed how this bias explains why so many people want to start saving “next month”, and next month never comes.³ To beat it without losing your mind, we need to simplify the picture.

Imagine two people who need to build a house. The first one goes out and lays 5 bricks a day. It’s such a small effort that it isn’t tiring, doesn’t disrupt the routine and the progress is barely noticeable in the first few days. The second person looks at this and says: “Laying just 5 bricks gets you nowhere. I’ll let time go by and, when I have some free time, I’ll put up all the walls at once.”

Time goes by. The first person, stress-free, builds the whole house. The second person realizes how big the hole is, sees they’d have to carry tons all at once, gets discouraged and never even starts.

When the brick lays itself

The good news is that you can use this very bias in your favor. Economists Richard Thaler, who later won the Nobel Prize, and Shlomo Benartzi created a program in which a company’s employees agreed, today, to increase their savings only with their upcoming raises. Since the decision was about the future, almost nobody resisted. And since the deduction came along with the raise, nobody felt the pinch. In just over three years, this group’s average savings rate went from 3.5% to 13.6% of their salary.⁴

The lesson goes far beyond money. The less the brick depends on how you feel that day, the more likely it is to get laid. It could be an automatic transfer on payday, a fixed time on your calendar to study or your gym bag already packed by the door.

Build your wall today

Whether it’s building a safety net, starting to invest or getting a project off the ground, the secret isn’t brute force or starting with a lot of money. It’s the time you give things to take shape.

Trying to invest huge amounts later because you ignored the subject for years is like trying to build the whole house in one weekend. Time doesn’t forgive those who try to bargain with it. What really changes the game is accepting that laying your 5 daily bricks, with discipline, is the only way to let the clock work in your favor.

Want to see it in numbers? In our compound interest calculator, compare how much a small amount saved every month grows with the same total put in all at once, only a few years from now. The difference usually surprises people.

To keep building your house, brick by brick, here are three more reads:

• The brick logic works exactly the same for money, and here the math proves the power of starting small.
• Often what makes us put things off is a hidden discomfort. Learn about the quick reward trap.
• And if you’re waiting for motivation to show up before you start, here’s why it usually comes later.

Editor’s note: Know someone who lives in an endless “I’ll deal with it later” and spends half their life chasing blown deadlines? Send them this article. Sometimes all we need is a reminder that laying 5 bricks a day is much easier than carrying the world on your back at the last minute.

Footnotes

1. Pronin, E., Olivola, C. Y. & Kennedy, K. A. (2008). Doing unto future selves as you would do unto others: Psychological distance and decision making. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(2), 224-236. ↩ source

2. Buehler, R., Griffin, D. & Ross, M. (1994). Exploring the “planning fallacy”: Why people underestimate their task completion times. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 366-381. ↩ source

3. Laibson, D. (1997). Golden eggs and hyperbolic discounting. The Quarterly Journal of Economics, 112(2), 443-477. ↩ source

4. Thaler, R. H. & Benartzi, S. (2004). Save More Tomorrow: Using behavioral economics to increase employee saving. Journal of Political Economy, 112(S1), S164-S187. ↩ source